Culture, it seems, is the next logical step in local economic development.
Greg Baeker was at Minto council recently, providing an overview of the town’s cultural plan and cultural mapping project.
Facing new economic realities, a growing number of municipalities across Canada and abroad are turning to municipal cultural planning and cultural mapping as powerful tools to support economic development and community building, and Baeker’s job is to show Minto how.
AuthentiCity, Baeker’s firm, is a Toronto-based consulting practice. It works with municipalities, local business and community coalitions to build local economies through culture. It offers three core services: municipal cultural planning, cultural mapping, and workshops.
Minto business and economic manager Belinda Wick-Graham stated “We are very lucky and fortunate to have be working with Baeker on the cultural mapping and plan project. We consider him the guru and he has done this across the province.”
Wick-Graham added that Minto has a group of 14 people involved in the arts and culture and the economic development communities.
“It’s not just arts and culture, it’s an economic development strategy,” she said.
Baeker explained it was the first year of the Creative Communities Prosperity Fund program “and not a lot of small rural municipalities were successful in the application. It’s a credit to the leadership of staff.”
In providing an overview, Baeker used the case study of Prince Edward County along Lake Ontario about midway between Toronto and Montreal.
“It’s become a bit of a poster child for a smaller rural community that has used culture and creativity to regenerate the economy,” he said.
Work on its cultural plan began with a new economic development strategy back in 2005.
“What their consultant said when they came in was that the county had very serious economic challenges, and basically said if they adopted a traditional economic development model – thinking about attracting industry, big new factories or major new businesses – there would be no chance of success.”
Baeker said, in short, they were told they had zero competitive advantage over other areas. But, they were told if they were willing to rethink economic development, and put the quality of community and quality of place to the centre of the strategy as an economic asset, the community could succeed.
The four areas of focus include: culture, tourism, agriculture including value-added, and then commerce and industry.
He explained that traditional commerce and industry do not go away. “That is just not where the growth is.”
Baeker stressed he was not promising identical results; however he said that area has seen significant growth to tourism, property assessment, and number of building permits.
More important, is the reversal of the population decline in the region, Baeker said. “This has been a multi-year strategy, but there have been some pretty impressive results.”
He asked, “What do we mean by culture’s role in the economy?”
Baeker said 80% of the growth of any economy does not come from new businesses moving there, it comes from existing assets.
He added, “What cultural planning is about is identifying those local cultural assets and businesses, and helping to grow them.”
There are growing and expanding creative industries in the province as well as rapidly expanding cultural tourism.
But most importantly, he said, is the contribution culture adds to the quality of place.
“Cultural planning is a ministry led process for identifying and leveraging a community’s cultural resources, strengthening the management of those resources, and integrating cultural resources into areas of planning and decision making.”
One of the things that means is in the past, the primary responsibility of culture for local municipalities was for funding of local libraries or museums, managing facilities, and delivering programs.
“It’s still important, but really the big shift is coming to see municipal responsibilities related to culture, and bringing culture into how planning is done, and how economic development is thought about.
“It’s the integration of culture that’s really the main point here,” Baeker said.
He said cultural mapping is simply a tool used to identify cultural assets within a community. That involves tangible assets, and the stories that are important to the community.
He said cultural assets are not arbitrary definitions.
“There are a number of categories the province has identified.”
Each of the major categories contains a number of subcategories.
Cultural assets contain not only non-profit arts and organizations, but culture-based businesses as well.
At the same time, cultural heritage is defined through the Heritage Act.
“It’s not making stuff up, it’s putting them within existing categories within a bigger framework.”
The way the cultural mapping will be done in Minto, is the first step in the process.
“There’s a myth that we don’t have the information on culture in our communities. We actually have a lot of information. The problem is that it is collected by different people and places.”
So, in the beginning, cultural mapping is about consolidating that information into one database.
Then that information can be used by transferring it into Geographic Information Systems (GIS), a planning tool used by many municipalities.
“It means you have a spatial database and can see where there are concentrations – and [they] can be used as another resource for planning.”
But one of the issues is that the cultural community is really fractured – from arts groups, to heritage groups, to library groups, to cultural business.
“They don’t all talk to one another – or all play nice together.”
Cultural mapping can be used to get a bigger sense of what is out there.
And he said, “Better information makes it easier to promote the area.”
It is a six-phase process to be completed before March.
The public step will be three launch community meetings on Nov. 8, 9, 10 in Clifford, Harriston, and Palmerston,
As well, a website will be developed to brand the process and explain what it is about, and the importance of culture.
The next phase includes gathering the information to create a database.
Then there would be a look at existing plans and economic development strategies, official plans, and finding ways to connect culture to those plans.
An initial set of community meetings will look at broad directions and test them to get some input and feedback.
After that point, the document would be written up with more concrete ideas and strategies, resources and responsibilities.
That would be capped off with an open house to launch the plan.
